Llawhaden

From bishops' borough to decay

A ruined castle stands at the end of the long main street, its twin-towered gatehouse still rising to full height. Everything else has left. The medieval burgage plots along the street mostly lie empty now, which is what happens to a chartered town over eight hundred years if the charter stops meaning anything.

Llawhaden had a lot going for it once. Bishop Bernard, the first Norman Bishop of St Davids, built a motte-and-bailey castle here in 1115, the year he got the job, and the village grew up around it. In 1281 Bishop Thomas Bek secured a licence for a weekly market and two annual fairs. Six years later he founded a hospital for "pilgrims, paupers, orphans, the old, weak and infirm," a hostel on the pilgrim route to St Davids where the road forded the Eastern Cleddau. The castle grew into a fortified palace with vaulted undercrofts, adorned bishops' chambers and a chapel — comforts more than defence. Then Henry VIII's Laws in Wales Acts ended the Marcher lordships in 1535, the castle was abandoned, and people carried the stone off to build other things. By 1603 the place was recorded as a "borough in decay."

Castle ruins and the nearest pub

So the castle grounds are free to walk, open-access under Cadw, and you will likely have them to yourself. The hospital survives too, after a fashion — one vaulted building standing to full height inside a ditched enclosure, roofless since the dissolution in 1535.

The village has no pub of its own. The nearest is the Bush Inn, just south on the B4314 towards Robeston Wathen — home-cooked food, a beer garden, free parking, and a Sunday carvery served midday to half past three, plus a second carvery on Wednesdays. Beyond the roasts the menu runs to belly pork, meat pies, beef and Yorkshire pudding, scampi, a burger called "Wanting More," and cheesecake. It rates well and locals treat it as the default.

Narberth and St Aidan's

For actual shopping you go to Narberth, a Georgian and Edwardian market town about five miles east with independent shops, delis and galleries. Haverfordwest, the county town, is fifteen to twenty minutes on for anything larger.

The church sits below the village beside the river, on the Landsker Line. St Aidan's is Grade II* and dedicated to a sixth-century Irish monk who studied under St David. Roughly four-fifths of the fabric predates the nineteenth century; the oldest identifiable parts are the twelfth-century piers of the chancel arcade. A separate Congregational chapel, Bethesda, is listed in its own right.

The Landsker border

The Landsker Line is the historic border where English-speaking south Pembrokeshire meets the Welsh-speaking north — "an imaginary line of history," as Welsh-cottages.co.uk puts it — and the Eastern Cleddau marks it here. The Landsker Borderlands Trail, a sixty-mile circular, doesn't come through the village but treats the castle as a worthy diversion. The river below carries salmon and sea trout. In spring the woodland paths fill with bluebells, foxgloves, primroses and early purple orchids.

Admiral Foley of Ridgeway

Admiral Sir Thomas Foley, who led the British line round the French van at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, was born on the family estate at Ridgeway in this parish. He later turned down Nelson's offer to serve at Trafalgar, pleading ill health.